


pushing wolfsbane

by stiles



Category: Pushing Daisies, Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, and then they come back again!, everybody dies!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-11-17
Updated: 2012-11-17
Packaged: 2017-11-18 21:40:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/565581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stiles/pseuds/stiles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>There was no box, no instructions, no manufacturer’s warranty; young Stiles stumbled upon his gift in the same way he stumbled through his life: with young Scott wheezing at his heels and the both of them veering wildly in the direction of trouble.</i>
</p><p>Pushing Daisies AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is for [Boa](http://monkeyscandance.tumblr.com/).   
>  WIP progress updates and random collaterals for this fic can be found on my rarely-updated [fic tumblr](http://www.tumblr.com/blog/parlayed).    
>  And I'm really sorry for reposting this fic but holy shit, someone hacked into my old AO3 account and deleted it and I'm about to flip all the tables in IKEA.    
> 

❖

 

At this very moment in the lacrosse-obsessed town of Beacon Hills, young Stiles was ten years, fourteen weeks, three days, and twenty-seven minutes old.

At the very same moment in that very same town, young Derek, while not quite as young as young Stiles, was still far younger than the Derek that he would come to be. He was sixteen years, twenty-two weeks, six days, and four minutes old. He was also happy. These were conditions that did not last.

Most stories start when the right people meet, but young Stiles had a gift, one that he would learn the limits of in the coming years, one that young Derek would learn the effects of before they would even speak. Their story started then, when young Stiles was young, and when young Derek still lived in a house in the woods with his family. When neither of them knew the other, or that the pages of their books would meet in the middle.

There was no box, no instructions, no manufacturer’s warranty; young Stiles stumbled upon his gift in the same way he stumbled through his life: with young Scott wheezing at his heels and the both of them veering wildly in the direction of trouble.

Trouble was a dead wolf in the woods.

To be fair, the dead wolf (two years, five weeks, four days, thirty-two minutes and not a second longer), by dint of being dead, veered closer to trouble than either young Stiles and Scott would ever veer. Trouble found it as a pair of headlights in the dark of the night, and as far as the dead wolf was concerned, its story had reached a definite full stop.

Young Scott poked at the dead wolf with a stick and declared it so.

Young Stiles poked at the dead wolf with his finger and made it _not_ so.

The dead wolf breathed as young Scott screamed, and young Stiles watched with vision that sparked at the edges with gold as the dead wolf turned out to be not very dead after all. The not-dead wolf ran away. And it was two years, five weeks, four days, thirty-three minutes old and counting.

This was the moment young Stiles realized he wasn’t like the other children in Beacon Hills. Young Scott took several minutes longer to reach the same conclusion; he needed to stop screaming first. Later on, as young Scott inhaled from his inhaler, they both agreed that the undeniable fact was this: Young Stiles could touch dead things and bring them back to life.

The terms of use weren’t immediately clear, nor were they of immediate concern, but young Stiles’s gift, like all rare gifts, had a price tag attached to it. And while the cosmic credit card bill had yet to reach young Stiles’s metaphorical doorstep, an owl in the trees above young Stiles and Scott felt its tiny heart seize in payment.

Then it felt nothing more.

 

❖

 

Young Stiles’s mother was by far the best mother a young person could want. This was the completely biased opinion of young Stiles’s, of course, because no one else ever baked cookies for him. General consensus leaned in the same direction (albeit with less fervor) but the only person whose opinion mattered was young Stiles anyway, as she was the provider of smiling welcome-homes, forehead kisses and giant bear hugs that took his breath away. Young Stiles called her ‘mom’. He loved her very much.

At this very moment, young Stiles’s mother was thirty-five years, twelve weeks, two days, and twenty minutes old. She was also baking cookies.

Young Stiles sat in his chair, legs dangling and mind wandering as he stared out the kitchen window. The seemingly-irrelevant fact that the house that young Derek lived in stood tall and sprawling and in conveniently plain view of young Stiles’s kitchen window would soon come to be even more relevant than usual.

Before that, young Stiles would learn about cerebral aneurysms. He would learn about one particular cerebral aneurysm.

He would learn the words ‘asymptomatic’ and ‘hemorrhage’ later on, listening to the adults speak over him with voices full of grief.

He learned a lot more between the the dusty pages of library books after that, and he built himself an armory in his head and stocked it with things -- big things and little things, science things and math things, lacrosse things and homework things -- things that were not smiling welcome-homes, forehead kisses and giant bear hugs that took his breath away.

The catalyst was this:

While young Stiles stared out the window a blood vessel in his mother’s brain burst, killing her instantly.

Exactly thirty seconds after that, young Stiles brought her back to life again.

What young Stiles didn’t know was that what his gift gave it took from elsewhere. The universe required balance, he would come to learn, but he did not learn it while watching the fire. It raged and crackled and lit up the forest for miles, and young Stiles and his mother stood at their conveniently-located kitchen window and watched the Hale house burn.

Later that night, young Stiles would learn another lesson:

 

> First touch, life; second touch, dead again, forever.

Touch number two was a goodnight kiss. It was the last forehead kiss young Stiles received from his mother.

 

❖

 

They met at the funeral.

It wasn’t a singular funeral per se; young Derek and his sister had ten to bury, coffins big and small, all in a row. It was ten funerals squeezed into one and it was easier to do it all in one day -- much like ripping off a band-aid in one go.

At that same moment, five old gravestones and a weeping angel statue away, young Stiles, too, had someone to bury. He held his father’s hand the entire time and said a grand total of nothing, never once fidgeting with his tie.

He saw young Derek then, square-jawed and silent and dressed all in black. And then he waved, because young Stiles felt bad -- worse than bad -- like his insides were all squished up and his chest hurt each time he breathed, and he couldn’t possibly imagine multiplying it by ten. So young Stiles waved, rearranging his face into something like a smile, and young Derek looked at him from across five old gravestones and a weeping angel statue and waved back.

Neither of them cried that day, but they made no such promises for the endless days after that.

 

❖

 

One particular day in the progression of endless days after the day young Stiles’s mother had died, briefly stopped being dead, and then died again, young Stiles, with the ever-present company of young Scott, set out to write the instruction manual for his gift.

They went back into the woods, not very far away from where the not-dead wolf once lay, and began to look for bugs.

Twenty three minutes, a stopwatch, an anthill, and countless insect bites later, young Stiles learned something else about his gift.

It was a gift with two simple caveats:

> 1) Keep a dead thing alive for more than a minute and something else would die in its place.
> 
> 2) Touch a dead thing twice and it dies again, forever.

And when they walked by the ash-dark grounds of the Hale house that day, young Stiles would connect the dots and _know_.

From that day on in the progression of endless days after the day young Stiles’s mother had died, briefly stopped being dead, and then died again, young Stiles would feel responsible for a total of eleven deaths.


	2. Chapter 2

  
❖

 

It’s six years, two weeks, nineteen days, and fifty-nine minutes later, heretofore known as Now.

Young Stiles has become not-so-young Stiles, the degree of not-so-youngness quantified by the six years, two weeks, nineteen days, and fifty-nine minutes since the day he discovered his gift.

And it was one month, fifteen weeks, three days and twenty minutes later that he came to the conclusion that he not only caused the second, more permanent death of his mother but also the first and last and also very crispy deaths of ten others.

Even young Scott, whose presence remained one of the few constants of young Stiles’s strange and lonely life did not know of this.

And no one saw young Derek and his sister for a very, very long time.

 

❖

 

The Stiles of Now still has Scott, who somehow grew up to be more asthmatic than he was before. Which is why he laughs in that ugly way that produces double chins and snorty noises when Scott asks him this:

“Dude, do you think we’ll make first line this year?”

Scott always thinks there’s hope when there really, really isn’t. It’s one of the many reasons why Stiles likes him.

“Sure, buddy,” Stiles says, slinging his arm over Scott’s shoulders, all lopsided grins and sarcasm. “And then maybe after that we can win the play-offs on the backs of unicorns, hmm?”

Stiles, on the other hand, always has an inhaler at the bottom of his backpack. He forgets about it when the days drag long and the school assignments pile up but he watches Scott at practice and he keeps it close by then.

Stiles’s gift is like having an extra quarter for the one-chance-only game of life, but anyone who plays any video game ever knows how quickly you run through them. Prevention is better than the alternative that Stiles refuses to call a cure, and Stiles wants to avoid the alternative until they’re at least fifty. If Scott goes game over; insert coin the first time round, Stiles will touch him and keep him alive and not even hesitate for a second. It’s what Stiles calls a Last Resort and is exclusive to only two people: Scott and Stiles’s dad.

That’s what Stiles thinks, anyway.

He adds more names to the list soon enough.

It happens not out of necessity nor of a conscious decision to Do the Right Thing, but like most of the events that make up Stiles’s strange and lonely life thus far, it happens because he’s there and because things just _are_. And while what he does (or does not do, to be exact) is not by any stretch of the imagination the Right Thing at all, the flipside, Stiles knows, would be most definitely the Wrongest Thing of All.

And that is how Derek Hale comes back into Stiles’s life.

 

❖

 

This part of the story begins with a possible 187, heard from a radio transmission that Stiles is not technically supposed to be listening to, confirmed by a phone conversation that Stiles makes sure to pretend he’s not shamelessly eavesdropping on.

He visits the morgue sometimes, keeps a watchful eye on the clock as he touches the bodies there and asks the freshly-undead questions that help his dad’s investigations along. The places he has access to because his dad’s the sheriff, seriously. Sometimes Scott tags along to bitch good-naturedly about everything within bitching distance, and when he’s taking a break from the bitching they spitball ideas on how to arrange police evidence in ways that would point Stiles’s dad in the right direction.

Using his powers for good, right? Spider-man’s totally educational.

Except Stiles doesn’t ask Scott to come along this time. In fact, he doesn’t say anything at all, not for a long while.

Mostly because he hears the name ‘Derek Hale’ crackle over the radio and suddenly he’s ten years, fourteen weeks, three days, and twenty-seven minutes old and wracked with guilt all over again.

 

❖

 

The time is 11:23pm and Stiles is staring at a toe tag.

A toe tag that claims to be attached to the big toe of Derek Hale, the tall and serious boy who, from five old gravestones and a weeping angel statues away, waved back at Stiles on the worst day of both of their lives. It’s the last time Stiles sees him alive but far from the last time Stiles will ever see Derek again, because the cosmic publisher of life stories has buggred alle this for a larke and bound the mismatched pages of their books together.

But the undeniable facts are these:

Derek Hale, age twenty-two years, three weeks, seventeen days and eighty-five minutes, returns to Beacon Hills and Stiles’s life after six years, two weeks, nineteen days, and fifteen hours after the worst day of his life in a body bag. And this is how it happens:

An unmarked white van picked up his body from where two joggers found it in the woods and brought it to the morgue.

The last thing Derek remembers is pain, cruel and dark, crawling deep, deep, deep into his heart.

The next thing he feels is an explosion of pain in his head.

“Holy _god_ , sorry, sorry! Dude, let me just --” is the first thing Derek hears, and then he’s sliding (sliding?) out into an unbearably fluorescent world where it feels like he’s licked a pole during winter, only it's happening with his butt.

He stares at the boy in front of him.

“Why,” Derek says slowly. “Am I naked.”

He’s starting to make sense of the butt situation, though.

And the bump on his forehead is throbbingly massive. “And did you just wake me up while I was still in the drawer?”

“Um,” the boy says, standing five feet away and literally wringing his hands. “Welcome back?”


	3. Chapter 3

❖

 

The time is 11:23pm and fifteen seconds and Stiles has no idea what to say.

Which is a complete lie because Stiles knows what to say and how to say it. Only he hasn’t. Can’t.

He wants to say ‘I’m sorry’, mostly, all six years’ worth of it, to speak the words into listening ears instead of the silent gravestones that he stops by every year before he sits with his mom, but the words just won’t come and time is running out. He really should’ve planned his speech beforehand. He also wants to know what Derek’s workout regime is like because seriously, what the fuck.

In the end he goes with the usual spiel:

“Yeah, hello. Hi. My name is Stiles and I just brought you back to life because I’m magic. Don’t know why or how but I am, and these are my spirit fingers. You just have to trust me, alright? I need to know if you know who it was who killed you and you have...” Stiles glances at the wall clock and winces. “... Thirty-nine seconds left to tell me everything.”

Derek continues staring at Stiles like he doesn’t have thirty -- oh, great -- thirty- _two_  seconds of life left to live. Stiles absolutely does not flap his arms in the direction of the clock when confronted with the silence.

“I don’t know,” Derek says finally. He plucks the tag off his toe and flexes his feet in the process, like he’s checking to see if his limbs are still working, and Derek looks, well, Derek looks like death. Pale and gaunt and miserable and unnaturally still. “I don’t know who killed me.”

“You don’t know?” Stiles echoes, incredulous, and then raises his hands at the look on Derek’s face. “What? You’re not giving me a lot to go on, okay?”

Derek shrugs and the movement is careless and graceful and wrong somehow, like it doesn’t even matter that the clock is running down on him.

Thirty seconds.

“I’m sorry,” Stiles blurts, suddenly frantic, and the words crack in his throat like a gunshot in the silence of the morgue, too loud and too sudden. Too much emotion. He’s not too good with tense situations.

Derek jerks his head up to look at him then, to  _really look_  this time, and Stiles just goes with his instinct and backpedals. Verbally and physically. Because he’s a coward. A cowardly, cowardly, coward. He gestures at the bump on Derek’s head, the jerky movement doing nothing to quell the strange buzzing feeling in his chest. “... For the forehead thing? You know, because I was looking at the tag and my hand slipped and I touched your big toe?”

He’s the worst.

Derek narrows his eyes at Stiles’s panic, nostrils flaring as he stares Stiles down like he knows something’s up. And it’s super effective. Derek fucking does this whole dangerous prowling thing and Stiles swallows with an audible click and flattens himself against the wall. He fumbles for something, anything at all to put more distance between them so he doesn’t have to touch Derek again, because Stiles doesn’t know what he’ll do once he realizes that he just killed another Hale. He really should’ve put more thought into this.

That’s when Derek’s arm makes a squelching noise.

They both look down at it and oh, god --

“Dude,  _gross_ ,” Stiles moans. “I think I just vomited a little in my mouth.”

Derek’s eyebrows climb halfway up his forehead. “I know who killed me,” he says, and he sounds hollowed-out beneath the thin layer of surprise in his voice. Stiles wants to touch him, maybe, to give him a pat on the shoulder. He clenches his fists and slides out of the way instead.

“Who?” Stiles prompts urgently.

Fifteen seconds.

“An Argent,” Derek snarls, eyes flashing bright blue for a second, and Stiles doesn’t have time to close his eyes or process all this new information or anything because Derek goes at the oozing wound with his index finger and gouges the bullet out of his forearm like it’s nothing.

“What -- what are you -- oh my GOD, why would you do something like that!?” Stiles shrieks. “And what the hell is an Argent!?”

Derek looks up at Stiles and his eyes are blue. His eyes are bright blue, a glow-in-the-dark, exceedingly unnatural and gorgeous sort of electric blue, and Stiles wonders why he never expected anyone else to be magic when he’s magic too.

“Oh,” Stiles whispers, completely breathless, and it’s only twenty-six percent due to the fact that he wants to throw up.

Exactly fifty-nine seconds after Stiles brings Derek Hale back, Stiles takes one step back and doesn’t touch him again.

The time is 11:24pm and Derek Hale is still alive.

Fuck.

 

❖

 

One thing the morgue does not have, Stiles finds, is a cupboard full of clothes for the recently-deceased to wear. This is largely because the recently-deceased don’t usually mind being in a state of undress, having ascended to a higher plane of being. And Derek, what with the twin excuses of having recently been deceased as well as having to deal with the distraction caused by the solving of his own murder, doesn’t seem to mind being naked very much at all. Stiles certainly doesn’t mind sneaking surreptitious glances at the planes of Derek’s being. But he finds a blood-spattered lab coat and bundles Derek up in it anyway, fingers light and jittery on the starchy cotton. It’s a bit small but it covers up the crotchy bits that are super distracting. That in itself is enough for now.

“So, werewolves,” Stiles says, drawing out his syllables. “Not a biological impossibility after all?”

“Because bringing dead people back to life is a widely-documented scientific phenomenon,” Derek says, poking at the wound on his arm that is knitting up at an alarming speed. At an accelerated pace, healing flesh sounds like saran wrap being peeled off a wet surface, and Stiles cannot decide if he wants to take a closer look or to turn around and barf. On the bright side, the gross-looking black veins are gone now (seriously, how did they miss that?), and Derek’s nose is turning the faintest shade of pink from the cold. He looks alive. Finally, properly so.

“Point taken,” Stiles concedes. “But if you have super healing powers then how did the Argents -- huh, cool -- was it a silver bullet? Do they really work on you?”

Derek scowls at him. “It was the wolfsbane, not the bullet. I probably used up all its magic when I died the first time.”

“Speaking of dying,” Stiles says. “You can’t do that again --”

“I’m not planning to,” Derek says flatly.

“-- That’s the spirit,” Stiles barrels on. “But seriously. You can’t do that again because I can only bring you back once and I’ve already used that up. Also I can’t touch you. Ever.”

Derek raises an eyebrow.

Stiles makes an ugly face in retaliation. “Still being serious here. If we touch, you’ll go back to being dead, and I’m not having that shit happen on my watch again.”

Derek is still for a good long while. “Again?” He prompts, and Stiles stamps down hard on the guilty urge to look away.

Stiles will tell him. At some point. They have time now, more than a minute’s worth, and Stiles will tell him and apologize and take anything Derek will give him then because he deserves it. But right now they’ll have to somehow make it out of the morgue unseen and Stiles will have to think of a way to hide a previously-dead werewolf in his room.

And also worry about that other thing.

“Any more rules?” Derek finally asks, because it’s becoming clear that Stiles isn’t about to elaborate further. He attempts to shrug on the lab coat properly but it’s a lost cause unless the thing is made out of incredible Hulk-standard spandex or something, which it’s not. All it’s doing is straining heroically at its seams.

“You don’t get to ride shotgun,” Stiles says, and then he has to laugh at the look on Derek’s face.

 

❖

 

Derek thinks he’s joking but he’s really not.

“Woah, woah, woah, dude, no shotgun for you,” Stiles reminds him. “You need to be at least three feet away from me at all times because these arms? They go everywhere. Get your ass in the backseat.”

Derek gives him such an epic bitchface over the hood of the jeep that Stiles would turn around and run in the other direction if he didn’t already know about the whole no touching thing.

“ _Please?_ ” Stiles adds.

Derek throws himself into the backseat so hard that the jeep jumps. “Drive,” he snaps.

Stiles does. And he forgets to ask Derek if he has anywhere else to go.

 

❖

 

To be fair, Derek forgets to tell Stiles if he has anywhere else to go. This boils down to the fact that he doesn’t, in fact, have anywhere else to go. He was supposed to be dead. And as far as Derek was concerned, being dead narrowed his destination options down to the basic two: Up or Down.

Standing awkwardly in a teenage boy’s bedroom at midnight dressed only in sweatpants is neither Up nor Down. Derek has no idea what to make of this.

Stiles, on the other hand, is busy rifling about in his drawers for clothes like he does this every other day. Maybe he does, who even knows, but underneath the usual teenage boy scent Stiles smells like guilt and lies and strangely enough -- good intentions. The last bit makes Derek pause.

“YES.”

Derek eyes the blue and orange striped thing that lands on the bed. “No.”

If this is Down, it’s not nearly  _Down_  enough for what Derek deserves. But it’s close.

“What, why?” Stiles whines. “I literally do not have shirts big enough to contain your Abercrombie and Fitch torso, okay? Take it or leave it.”

Derek very pointedly leaves it.

Stiles just flings his hands up, grabs a pillow off the bed and throws himself onto the floor.

Derek stares. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Letting you have my bed?” Stiles says, the ‘duh’ a given, his face all mashed into his pillow already. “You can’t be around when my dad gets back in the morning, though, you know that, right?”

Derek watches Stiles flop around in a vain attempt to find a comfortable sleeping position for a few seconds before he sits on the edge of Stiles’s bed, quiet and careful, two feet and eleven inches away from Stiles’s bare foot. “Why are you doing this?” He needs to know.

Stiles is a terrible liar, even without the werewolf senses being called into play. The lines of his back stiffen at the question and Derek waits.

“I just have to,” Stiles whispers. His heartbeat thunders on in Derek’s ears, steady as a rock.

It’s the truth, mired in its omission of everything else that complicates.

It’s enough for now.


	4. Chapter 4

 

❖

 

Once he’s at least 75 percent sure that Derek’s asleep, Stiles puts on a hoodie and does what he does best when he’s in deep shit: he looks for Scott.  
  
Stiles parks the jeep a little ways down the street and climbs through Scott’s bedroom window, left wide open for no good reason at all at 3am in the morning. It’s frigid in the way ass o’clock feels like on the numb tips of Stiles’s fingers and how everything is damp with dew, which makes climbing things a lot harder than normal for Stiles’s already sub-par levels of hand-eye coordination. And all this cold air so cannot be good for Scott’s asthma, Stiles thinks while ducking carefully into Scott’s room, his lungs hurting with his tree-scaling efforts -- and promptly steps on Scott’s sleeping face.    
  
“Shut up, shut up!” Stiles hisses, clapping his hand over Scott’s mouth as soon as he tumbles all the way into the room. Scott’s flailing arm catches him in the jaw, which, yeah, okay, he probably deserves, but a) _OW_ , and b) they’re about this close to waking up Scott’s mom and Stiles just can’t deal with that right now. He can’t.  
  
“Stiles, what the fuck are you doing?!” Scott whisper-screams at him a minute later, half a muddy shoe print on his cheek and flushed with sleep and the shock of having someone step on his face at 3am in the morning. They’re both tangled up in the sheets and Stiles is still sitting on top of Scott’s legs. Just in case Scott’s not all the way conscious yet and tries to hit him with the bat that Stiles knows is under his bed. He still has no idea why the McCalls even own one when _literally no one in this entire town plays any baseball_.  
  
“I missed my boo?” Stiles says, grinning as he makes a clumsy attempt at wiping the mud off Scott’s face with the sleeves of his hoodie. “And you should really lock your windows when you sleep.”  
  
Scott swats his hands away with a scowl. “Seriously, Stiles, it’s really late and we have tryouts tomorrow.”  
  
Stiles groans and rolls off Scott. “Dude, we’re not making the team. All this vain hoping you’re doing is really starting to depress me.”  
  
“Shut up,” Scott snaps, and moves to make space for Stiles on the bed anyway. They lie there for a while in relative silence -- relative because Stiles keeps making farty noises with his mouth, but there’s no actual talking involved so it counts -- until Scott elbows him in the ribs and props himself up, all best friendy mcseriousface. “Stiles,” he whispers, hesitant like he’s remembering what it was like when Stiles’s mom had died, all the endless, terrible hours Stiles spent curled up at the edge of Scott’s bed because his dad still had to work nights and Stiles couldn’t stay in the house by himself like that, not completely alone. “Is something wrong?”  
  
Stiles has never loved Scott more.  
  
“No, I’m fine,” Stiles says out of reflex, clambering back into a sitting position and facing Scott. He’s probably not fine, like, at all, but it’ll take a while more for that to sink in, thank god, and hopefully he’ll be back home and freaking out in the privacy of his bathroom by then. “But we have to look for a body.”  
  
Scott’s eyebrows scrunch together. “A dead body?”  
  
Wow, it’s like Scott hasn’t been around the past six years. “No, a body of water,” Stiles deadpans, and then flails his arm in the direction of Scott’s face to cut off what Stiles is certain is going to be a stupid but genuinely concerned question about the town lake, because it’s exactly how Scott rolls. “Yes, a dead body, you dumbass, and put on a jacket because it’s freezing out.”  
  
And because Scott is the best ever, he gets out of bed, no more questions asked, and does exactly that.

 

❖

 

“You what?!” Scott yells later on, tangled awkwardly in the jeep’s seatbelt, his eyes cartoon-wide.

Stiles cringes. “Yeah, Derek’s still alive,” he confirms.

“Which means --”

“Which means someone else is dead,” Stiles says quietly, and there it is -- the horrible difference between knowing it and saying it out loud.

“Oh,” Scott says. And then he’s quiet for a long, long time after that.

Stiles keeps his grip on the steering wheel unnecessarily tight the entire time, and he doesn’t -- not for a single second -- take his eyes off the road, not even when his eyes start to prickle or when his throat closes up and makes it harder to breathe, because he’s suddenly afraid of the look he might see on Scott’s face if he does. That this is too much to ask, even for Scott, and Stiles has never considered the limits of their friendship before this moment.

They’re turning into the morgue’s driveway when Scott finally speaks. “We’re gonna fix this, right?” he asks.

Stiles wants to say yes, he really does. The hand Scott places on the rigid crook of his elbow feels like nothing Stiles deserves right now. “I don’t know,” he admits. “I want -- I’m trying to, but I don’t know how yet.”

“Okay,” Scott replies simply, all trust and faith, and Stiles has to put the jeep in park and learn how to breathe again as he hauls Scott in for a hug.

 

❖

 

Turns out there isn’t a dead body for them to find.  
  
Stiles has no idea if that’s good or bad.

**Author's Note:**

> ( [▲](http://monkeyscandance.tumblr.com/post/29566963125/if-you-havent-read-the-wip-of-pushing-wolfsbane) ) art by BOA.


End file.
